'Scarcely,' replied Laura, with a little reserve; 'for it is your style to yawn and fret to-day over all that enchanted you yesterday. You tire of everything.'
'And thus would very soon tire, I fear, of such a lover as your Allan Mac Innon. He is but a wild Highland boy—I should like a man with a lofty presence—a man of whom I should feel proud, even when I had tired of him, and ceased to love him.'
'Oh, Fanny! I am proud of him, in my own quiet and unobtrusive little way. He is so bold, so hardy, so active, and so manly!' said poor Laura, blushing deeply at her own energy, while my heart beat with tumultuous joy; 'his eyes, too—do they not tell the history of a sad and thoughtful life? He is like the Mac Ivor of Waverley.'
'There it is! you have caught the tartan fever, which is nearly as bad as the scarlet one, and may be worse now, since the Line have lost their epaulettes. Well, I should like a lover of whom one would not be ashamed to make one's husband.'
'Husband—'
Laura was silent; and, trembling with joy, I forgot all about poor Callum Dhu, who was seated patiently with my baggage on the pier, awaiting the steamer which was now coming down the loch.
'Young Mac Innon is so poor, so wild, so strange!' resumed the painfully plain-spoken Fanny.
'These only make me the more his friend.'
'And we all know that "friendship in woman is kindred to love." He is quite like a young robber.'
'Well,' replied Laura, taking up her lively friend's rattling manner, 'I always thought it would be divine to marry a bandit! When we travelled from Rome to Naples, I looked daily for a handsome young brigand in a sugar-loaf hat, velvet jacket, and those red bandages which no outlaw is ever without—a Masseroni—a Fra Diavalo—but, alas! none ever came, and we jogged as quietly along the Appian Way as if it had been Rotten Row or the Canterbury-road.'